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The Chancellor’s aspirations: not quite as we’d hoped.

THE CHANCELLOR’S CLOWNS came up with the risible phrase “aspiration nation” for this year’s Budget. They no doubt thought this was a real cracker, something to rival Miliband’s equally risible “One Nation Labour”, or whatever it was. Someone ought to tell our politicians to stop treating us like children and start issuing cyanide pills to the addlepated advisors who come up with this drivel.

Presumably they thought we’d be electrified by the image of ambitious, go-head people, fizzing with great ideas and fuelled with endless energy and about to transform the country from an over-regulated, debt-bound nation into a dynamic, shiny place full of smiley citizens. Unfortunately the wonkish wonder of the phrase triggers a different image in my mind, one that exemplifies “aspiration” in an entirely different way.

In the year before I went to university I worked as a Nursing Auxiliary in a local Hospital. One afternoon I had to assist while the doctors performed an “aspiration” upon a patient who had lung cancer. It was quite a macabre business. The patient had to sit up in bed and rest his head on his arms folded on one of those movable trays you put your dinner on. As he sat there a doctor inserted a hypodermic into his side. When I say hypodermic I’m talking about something that you’d imagine a vet using on a horse: it was gigantic – the needle, the plunger and the chamber. The doctor had to navigate the needle through skin and muscles, between the ribs, through the outer wall of the lung and into the pleural cavity.

Having pushed the needle to just the right spot he drew back the plunger. The hypodermic chamber filled with bloody fluid. When he’d finished one draw, the doctor, keeping the needle in place, turned a little valve and pushed the plunger in, causing the fluid to squirt out from a hole in the chamber. That’s where I came in, because I was tasked with holding the jug to catch the fluid, which I then disposed of in the Sluice Room.

I thought after the first aspiration that would be it: the jug was full and must have contained a couple of pints (and I’m not converting that into metric). It wasn’t. It seemed to go on for ages, one draw after another, four or five times. I couldn’t believe how much fluid was in there.

Whatever relief this may have brought the poor man it was only temporary. The disease was too far gone and he died not long after.

So, contrary to the intentions of Mr Osborne and his wacky wonks, the phrase “aspiration nation” makes me think of a body in terminal decline, enduring painful interventions for only short-term relief. There’s no need to labour the metaphor. As far as the country’s concerned all we know is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We just don’t know how much worse.

Or, indeed, if it will ever get better.

Michael Blackburn.

 

 

 

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